The next night would be Sam Cunningham’s first game. He looked out the window and saw black men, women and children running to the edge of the street. Reaching out to the bus. Cheering. Does this happen all the time?

“I found out later that it didn’t,” Cunningham said, laughing.

Then Cunningham and the Trojans went to Legion Field to play Alabama, the white knights of college football. He was the second-string fullback.

The first team ran at will, Cunningham came in and gained 135 yards and scored two touchdowns. Even the third team had its way.

“They weren’t very big or powerful,” Cunningham said of the Crimson Tide. “I’m not saying they weren’t talented. But it wasn’t a very difficult game.”

USC won convincingly, 42-14.

And the people they convinced were the Alabama fans who, up until that moment, refused to accept the concept of black faces in red helmets.

What they didn’t realize is how Coach Bear Bryant, their holy father on earth, had made them witness the truth.

Bryant was race-neutral, which made him a progressive, and he was a pragmatist. He knew integration would only happen when he demonstrated how it would win more games for Alabama.

This game, arranged with his buddy John McKay, could have happened in L.A. Playing it in Birmingham brought everything back home.

McKay told the players in the spring that they were about to do something far more important than win a game. He never elaborated.

“Prejudice is nothing more than sensual hate,” said John Papadakis, a linebacker for those Trojans. “The people needed to see a black man score a touchdowns and a white man embrace him, to share their sweat.

“Really, this was the ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner’ of college football. As Trojans, we were conditioned to go on the road, take everything and leave people with nothing. That night we took everything and left them with something valuable.”

Wilbur Jackson was on the freshman team. He played varsity in 1971. So did JC transfer John Mitchell.

Bryant would claim three more national championships in the 1970s.

And, in the South, fresh winds gained velocity.

The degree of that change is measured in a documentary called “Breaking The Huddle,” which premieres on HBO on Tuesday night.

To use “HBO” and “excellent” in the same sentence is a redundancy, of course. The tradition continues here.

The show deals with the courage of Darryl Hill of Maryland and Jerry Levias of SMU, who used resentful fury to run a punt back for a touchdown, then realized the personal toll.

“Segregation was like being dropped behind enemy lines,” said Thom Gossom, an actor who played for Auburn in the early ’70s. “Back then, the N word was like ‘Good morning.'”

But when you watch “Breaking The Huddle,” you wonder who will break the sideline.

There are four black coaches among the 120 football schools in the top division.

“I think maybe it’s the last domain that they can control,” Gossom said. “But I do think it will change. I see Auburn is interviewing Turner Gill. If we elect a black President and Auburn hires a black coach in the same year … I don’t know if I can quite believe something like that.”

Gill, the ex-Nebraska quarterback, coached Buffalo to the MAC title. Buffalo had won seven MAC games in seven years before Gill took over.

Charlie Strong has been a defensive coordinator at South Carolina and Florida since 1999 and has coached in 12 January bowl games. When Mississippi State went to raid Florida’s staff for a new coach (after Sylvester Croom, the SEC’s first and only black coach, resigned), it chose offensive coordinator Dan Mullen.

The Alabama-USC game was not televised, but Gossom, at Auburn, got plenty of calls. Papadakis remembers Bill Holland scoring the final TD, with half the fans already in the parking lot. He heard an eerie roar, from somewhere. Black fans who couldn’t get tickets were standing outside, listening on their radios.

In 2003, Papadakis and Cunningham went to USC’s opener at Auburn and stopped at a restaurant in Montgomery. The waiters and cooks, all black, mobbed Cunningham, 33 years later. His picture was hanging on their walls at home. As they gathered and embraced him, Cunningham began crying himself.

Gossom returned to Auburn this fall, and when he told current black students about restaurants he couldn’t enter in the ’70s, they were incredulous. And he noted that there were so many blacks on campus that they didn’t necessarily all know each other, which he took as progress.

Driving out of Auburn, Gossom told his wife, “You know, I think the stuff is all gone now.”The stuff began leaving the stadium when the Trojans broke the huddle.

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